Talk:Spectral Stalkers (book)
Tricky steps in the cellar of Vitreous Citadel Okay, so I'm not sure if this could count as an error or it's just me nit-picking, but after encountering it, it bothers me a lot. (258) introduces the tricky steps. Let's see what we're talking about: X marks those spots that we know are traps, O marks the offered steps to skip. First idea? Let's check the distances. 1, 2, 4. First thought? Powers of two, which means the next safe distance should be 8, so we should skip 21, right? Wrong, there's no such an option. Erm... Chances are I wouldn't be alone with this first guess so it would have been logical to have that here instead of 17, even if that would lead us to certain death as well. I mean, elimination by missing option? Seriously? All right, so not power-of-two numbers. Let's try something else. 2-1=1, 4-2=2, so maybe the length of the safe spots are increasing by one more every time. Okay, this is a stetch with only three spaces and two differences, but still an idea. So 4+3=7, meaning the next safe area would be 7 stairs long, making 20 the next dangerous one. And victory, so after that the next one should be 7+4=11 safe step away, making 32 the next dangerous step. Except for the fact, of course, that (373) says it's 33. Why? And how? And why? Why did it work for the first four traps, but not for the fifth? Okay, it was just a wild guess, there's not enough information, but still. And then it hit me. The distances are not 1, 2, 4, 7, but 0, 1, 2, 4, 7. The increments here are 1, 1, 2, 3, which are the Fibonacci-numbers. Very good thinking on Globus' part, very bad assumption that the fighter would figure this out with 6 assumed trap positions. At the very least there should have been one more question to the reader at (315), preferrably along the lines of "turn to the section with the same number as the step you wish to skip / 11 * 27". Maybe he could have done it on (258) as well, just to make sure that the "warrior who fails to calculate correclty" is actually thinking of the same algorithm as he (Darvill-Evans) does. I'm pretty sure that a kid (target audience) wouldn't get this. Also, I feel that mocking the reader is a pretty crappy thing to do after all this. Does anyone have any opinions about this? Firefoxpdm (talk) 21:13, May 16, 2014 (UTC) :I think I have just witnessed something profound. Also liking the skip test idea; more proof that we fans could do better than the official authors if we set our minds to it. :D 22:17, May 16, 2014 (UTC) ::I myself would never say that I could do it better, because I know I couldn't. It's always easier to spot the mistakes others make because you have a fresh set of eyes on their work, while they are in the middle of it. The best I can do is offer some alternative solutions but it still should be the writer (or someone else, anyone else) to implement those ideas into practice. Also, I have to admit that I like the description of how you cautionsly skip step 19 just to land on step 20 and get fried to death. Such a vivid description would either not have been possible with the suggested counting solution or would have waster a lot of sections. Of course you can always expand the book to be 420 sections long :) Firefoxpdm (talk) 08:02, May 17, 2014 (UTC)